


No Man's Eden

by yuletide_archivist



Category: Batman - All Media Types
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2003-12-21
Updated: 2003-12-21
Packaged: 2018-01-25 05:59:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,745
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1635272
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/yuletide_archivist/pseuds/yuletide_archivist
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>No Man's Land: Poison Ivy meets the mysterious new Batgirl.</p>
            </blockquote>





	No Man's Eden

**Author's Note:**

> Written for Drowned Girl Fuschia

 

 

Another weird vine shooting up from the snow outside of Robinson Park -- hadn't Penguin, or Two-Face -- _someone_ \-- made a deal with Ivy yet? That nothing grew anywhere else in what was left of Gotham was enough to bear, without watching green and growing things edge their way out of Ivy's poisonous, enchanted territory. 

A shame you couldn't spraypaint plants. Helena had a mind to tag the errant vine with a yellow bat, even though it was, strictly speaking, growing up through the asphalt in Xhosa territory. 

She wondered if it were edible, this plant. She couldn't remember the last time she'd seen a fresh fruit or vegetable. The edge of a shuriken would cut it -- 

"I wouldn't, Batgirl," said a voice above her. _Look up,_ Helena reminded herself, _always look up_. The new costume took getting used to; her peripheral vision, for one thing, was badly compromised. "It's not edible, and it might get tetchy." 

Poison Ivy, then. Helena hadn't expected Ivy to stick that green nose out of her park -- not with pets like Ferak to do her surveillance work. 

"You're out of bounds," Helena said, keeping her voice pitched low as she looked up into the tree opposite the entrance to Robinson Park. 

"So are you," Ivy said negligently. "I suspect you're telling yourself you're protecting the helpless citizens who've managed to wander outside the Bat's territory." 

Helena held her silence. 

"By analogy, call me the protector of the plant population." 

"Plants don't wander." Generally. 

"Shows what you know, little Bat. Didn't you return my sweet Ferak just a few days ago?" Ivy flipped neatly down in front of Helena, closer than Helena would have liked, but not so close she needed to actually telegraph her discomfort by backing away. 

"If by 'sweet' you mean 'deadly.'" Helena felt a weird shudder at the mention of Ivy's mutated plant clone. Ferak had been so vulnerable, nothing more than a child -- but heedlessly destructive in her innocence. 

"We have no need of streets now," Ivy said calmly, backing toward the entrance to the park. "We have no need of streets, or cars, or pollution. No need of men's thoroughfares." 

She even moved like a plant, Helena thought -- you didn't so much notice Ivy move until she'd already got where she was going. What was the word....? Phototropism. Growing towards the light. 

Or away from it. 

"No need of their names and costumes, either." Ivy glided too close, now, touching Helena's mask with a finger. "Why have you traded in your own mask for _his_ , pretty Huntress?" 

Helena was glad for the new version of her mask, which covered her mouth, covered her eyes. Maybe Ivy could sense surprise, or smell it somehow, but Helena at least didn't have to let it show on her face. 

"It didn't take the world's greatest detective. I sent Ferak out to test you, and you bound her with a crossbow." 

Fair enough. 

Ivy moved in close enough that Helena took an involuntary step back. "Only one woman in our fair city, anyway, who would take up the Bat's mantle and expect to keep living." 

As Helena moved, Ivy's errant vine wrapped itself around her ankle. "Be careful," Ivy said softly, and then, as Helena yanked her leg away from the offender, "it's got thorns." 

So it did. Thick barbed thorns grew away from the bark of the plant, piercing leather, kevlar, and Helena's own skin. It didn't hurt, but instead felt invasive, queasy, a too-sharp needle in her flesh. 

"Poisonous thorns," Ivy said, as if an afterthought. Helena felt it, almost instantly -- the loss of sensation, the enervating weakness ebbing into her blood. Paralysis. Her muscles fought to move, to panic, to throw off this enchantment, but she couldn't move. 

It was if her heart, too, was stopping -- she couldn't even panic. 

"You'll get sensation back eventually," Ivy said calmly. "It's not fatal. You're just unable to move." Ivy's hand ran over her masked face. "Until it pleases me that you do so." She gestured, a compelling sorceress, to her pet vine. Helena watched, mute and motionless, as something like a walking oak tree came to join its wandering vine. The tree picked her up in leafy branches like talons, and carefully followed Ivy over the threshold of Robinson Park. 

_Under no circumstances should you enter the park,_ Batman had said. _Let Ivy have her way in there. It's not worth the risk._

And the irony was, for once, she'd been listening to him. She'd been on the Bat-program -- hell, she'd _been_ the Bat-program -- with a submission that would have put even Nightwing to shame. She'd had no desire to enter Poison Ivy's bower, but, as usual, what she wanted didn't amount to a pile of guano in this damn city. 

They passed into a grove of fruit trees where the botanical garden should have been, apples and pears growing incongruously where there should have been snow. 

Not for the first time, Helena Bertinelli wondered who you prayed to when your causes were too helpless for St. Jude.   
 

* * *

  


Ivy led her entwife -- and its captive -- into the park. The spiky-leaved _quercus_ variant had been bred for mobility, but wasn't any brighter than the average oak. What held Ivy's interest now was the woman neatly paralyzed within its branches. 

A new Batgirl. Never mind she was old enough to be a Bat _woman_. 

In the past, Ivy had taken her cue from Harley and avoided the Huntress -- a deadly foe and not independent enough to lead into a profitable scheme. But Harley's gossip had it that she was also too much of a loose cannon to have Batman's sanction in Gotham. 

Interesting, then, that the Batman had never managed to evict her. 

It was No Man's Land, now -- this wasn't Gotham City anymore, and the Dark Knight had hardly drawn his yellow bat-wings on a dozen brick walls, much less dictate the rules of who associated with whom. Harley had returned to her beloved sociopath, and Ivy, most days, wished the Joker joy of her. 

Which left Ivy with a parkfull of her beautiful creatures, with fresh fruit in January, with a dozen orphan children beholden to her for food and safety -- take _that_ , Arkham Asylum. Nature's bounty had risen to re-possess Gotham's last bit of green. As man's machines and chemical poisons retreated, Ivy could feel an almost healing presence within her bower. An unnatural summer; a surfeit of life. What had been suppressed, arose. She'd never been more aware of her power, of the certainty of her purpose. 

She was also, to be honest, a little bored. 

Hence the puzzle of Batgirl. The Huntress, in her new fashion statement halfway between fetish and purdah. Why had she chosen the used mantle in place of her own signature? Ivy took a sharp fingernail and grew it a little sharper, ran it like a fine blade down the back of the Batgirl's mask. 

Time for all the masks to fall, as Gotham had fallen. 

Lustrous black hair under the tight cowl, pale skin blistered and marred by some kind of rash. Ah. 

"Don't tell me it was vanity that made you hide your face." Ivy made the girl look up at her. She looked young, somewhat frightened, nothing like the Huntress' ferocity in her wide brown eyes. 

Lovely, really. 

"Chemical blisters?" she asked, but the girl couldn't move even an eye. "Enough, Elleba," she said to her trawling serpent vine, which had draped itself over the branches of the entwife. The vine retracted its thorns, leaving small tears in the fabric and spots of blood where it had pricked the new Batgirl. She stood without movement or reaction, a tableau held between pain and fear. 

Lovely. 

"Was this caused by some kind of poison?" Ivy asked again, tracing the girl's marred red cheek, and this time the brown eyes closed in assent. Not much time before she would regain the use of her body. Vulnerable, then, but quick to heal. No surprise: the Batman favored resilience in his proteges. 

Ivy tasted the poison with her lips -- ah, she'd been taught to fear Ivy's kisses, had she? She tasted acetone, benzene, petroleum; she turned and spat the foul taste from her mouth. Spray paint, it seemed, a certain risk in these days. Easily taken care of. Ivy's touch healed the Batgirl's poisoned skin, and Ivy claimed her reward for the work with an open kiss on her mouth. 

She tasted like cold air and water, like flesh food and garlic; she tasted like fury. And oh, what sweet indignation in her eyes. "Say thank you, Huntress." 

The words came slowly, grudged out of half-paralyzed lips. "Thank you." 

"You won't get anywhere pleasing him," Ivy told her. "He only wants submission, obedience. That's not what you are." 

"You have no idea what I am." Musculature regaining some control. Ivy climbed into her little entwife and prepared not to be there when the Huntress returned to her full power. She could not expect the Elleba vine to fool her twice. 

"Neither does he," said Ivy. 

"I'm showing him." There was a grim determination in the girl's tone. 

"Good luck," said Ivy, putting as much disdain as she could into the wish. The Huntress - Batgirl -- began to move her head back and forth. In a short time she would regain her strength, and replace her hood, and go out to be the chattel of men again. "When you get tired of playing with the boys and their games," Ivy told her, "I'll be here." 

"Spreading your poison," the Huntress seethed. 

"Poison is a natural defense mechanism. It needn't spread unless we're attacked." Her _we_ included her creations, her growing things, her children. "All we want to do here, Batchild, is grow strong enough to survive." Ivy reached up into the branches of the orchard and threw an apple into the snow at her feet. "I expect you understand that." 

Silence, and then two whispered words. "Survival. Yes." 

The Huntress' hand moved -- over her snow-pale cheek, over her lips red as blood. She picked up the apple so quickly that Ivy nearly missed the motion, and then she disappeared into the shadows, into the growing darkness. 

*Note: for the purposes of this story, the events of Ivy's enslavement by Clayface [Shadow of the Bat #88] take place after Helena/Batgirl's encounter with Ferak, [No Man's Land #0]. This story takes place between the two episodes.* 

 


End file.
